Social presence

noun phrase

The feeling that another person has actually arrived in an exchange, even through a screen: what happens can reach them, and they can alter what happens next.

Social presence is the sense that another person is properly there with you in a mediated exchange. Their camera may be off, their face twelve centimetres high and paused on an expression they would never voluntarily hold. Still, they have arrived. An online-status dot can stay green from breakfast to supper while the human behind it offers roughly the companionship of a printer cartridge. Presence begins when the exchange is allowed to interfere with both people: somebody notices the hesitation under ‘all good’, changes the question, offers the missing context, carries what was said into the next decision. Stephanie Tietz, Evi Kneisel and Katja Werner examined 148 knowledge exchanges in virtual teams and found social presence far more often in the successful ones. Remote work removed the office’s habit of leaking context for free by the kettle and in the corridor, so a remote team has to make those chances on purpose.